Resources

Creating and editing forms

You can bring paper or electronic
forms (distributed mainly as PDF in an office environment)
into OmniPage Professional 16, recognize them and edit
their content, layout or both - in True Page view. Draw
form zones over the relevant areas of your image before
recognition, or choose Form as recognition layout, then
use the two toolbars: Form Drawing and Form Arrangement
to make modifications and produce a fillable form and
save it in the following formats: PDF, RTF, or XSN (Microsoft
Office InfoPath 2003 format). Static forms can be saved
to HTML. OmniPage Professional 16 uses the Logical Form
RecognitionTM technology to process forms.

Please note
that OmniPage supports form creation and editing, however
the tools available here are not designed to fill in
forms.

The Form Drawing Toolbar

This is a dockable toolbar, displayed
in the Text Editor that allows you to create a range
of form elements using the following tools:

Selection:
Click this tool to be able to select, move, or resize
elements in your form.

Text: Use the text tool to add
fixed text descriptions on your form such as titles,
labels and headers.

Line: The Line tool is mainly used
in layout design: click it and draw lines to separate
distinct sections in your form.

Rectangle: Click this
tool to create rectangles in your form for design purposes.

Graphic: Use this tool to select areas of your form that are to be treated as graphics.

Fill text: Click this tool to
create fillable text fields. These are fields where you
want people to enter text.

Comb: Use this tool to create
a text field consisting of boxes. This is typically used
for information such as ZIP codes.

Checkbox: Click this
tool and draw Checkboxes - typically for Yes/No questions
and marking one or more choices.

Circle text: Its function
is similar to the Checkbox element (above): the Circle
text tool creates elements that get encircled when selected.

Table:
This tool creates tables in your form.

You can also create
form elements by right clicking an existing form element
in your recognized form, and choose the Insert Form Object
menu item.

The Form Arrangement Toolbar

The tools on this toolbar
can be used to line up form elements or to set which
one is on top of the others when they overlap. This latter
function is useful for example if you want to create
a background graphic design for your form.

To set the
order of overlapping elements, use the “Bring to
Front” and “Send to Back” buttons.

To
align the right/left, top/bottom edges or the centers
of the selected form elements

horizontally - use the
horizontal alignment tools

vertically - use the vertical
arrangement tools.

The commands of the Form Arrangement
toolbar are also accessible from the shortcut menu of
any form element.

Editing Form object properties

To edit a form object directly
select it then right-click the given element to display
its shortcut menu. You can edit the appearance or the
properties of any form element here. Use the following
commands:

Form Object Appearance - use the tabs Borders,
Shading and Shadow to design the look of your form elements
in a similar way as you would do in a text-editing application.

Form
Object Properties - this command gives you access to
the element properties such as size, position, name.
Note that properties dynamically vary depending on what
type of element you select.

Extracting Form Data

Form data extraction is a new workflow
step. Data is extracted from elements such as fillable
fields, check boxes, and option buttons.

Choose Extract Form Data in place of recognition,
and specify its settings. Set an active PDF form
as template. It can be single or multi-page, filled
or unfilled. The program determines the location
and type of the form fields based on this form template.

Finish
the workflow with a saving step.

OmniPage will extract
data from the form, using the specified template. Export
is to a comma separated value text file (.csv) ready
to be loaded into a spreadsheet.

Once you select Form
Data Extraction in a workflow, only saving steps will
follow.